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Monthly Archives: September 2011

Fall is my favorite time of year, and though the northern states are probably feeling the season more acutely, the south is now starting to experience the trickle down. Just as stories of becoming are typically more interesting than stories of being, I think the transitional seasons are more pleasant than Summer and Winter.

C.S. Lewis writes of perceiving the idea of Autumn as a child through Beatrix Potter’s book Squirrel Nutkin.

“It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and, as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible–how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it.”

There does seem to be a thought in Lewis’ writings that the beauty inspires longing because there is a tension between man’s spiritual aspirations, and his fallen (no pun) condition. Because beauty speaks most directly to the spirit, it makes sense that beauty has fallen out of fashion in academic pursuits of art–especially since the narrative of modernity tends to run along the rails of scientific materialism which denies the spirit altogether.

At any rate, I have done an illustration in a fall setting in honor of the coming season.

Pencil Rough

Excerpt from Thomas Forsythe’s, The Ballads of the Fourteenth Regiment: sung during various campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, The Low Countries, and France from 1799 to 1818 with notices of variant constructions. Volume 1.

The Ballad of Colonel Sly

Good Colonel Sly often was widely perceived

As the fanciest dandy that could be conceived.

He rode on the furry red back of a fox

And ladies did gaze at his golden forelocks.

O dum de de dum de de dum de de day

de dum de de dum de de dum de hurray!

The Colonel was fine and he stood six feet two

But poor as a church mouse he was, yes it’s true

So the wealthiest daughters were all locked away

Which caused the poor Colonel to protest foul play.

O dum de de dum etc.

But one soft grey morn Colonel Sly said “good day”

To a wealthy young widow who happened his way

And in no time at all they were married. Some say

They rode off on his fox with a fine rose bouquet.

O dum de de dum etc.

Photo of the ink version sans photoshop.

UPDATE: It is quite possible that there is no such person as Thomas Forsythe, and no such book as The Ballads of the Fourteenth Regiment. There further exists the possibility that “The Battle of Colonel Sly” may have been made up. However, I stand by my comments on Fall.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, it is a Playstation3 first-person shooter where one shoots alien-zombies (IN THE FIRST PERSON!!!). Alien-zombies may not be exactly novel, but this story is in the PAST! BAM! What do you say to that? It’s like West Side Story meets Predator. Yes it is. It’s exactly like that. Stop arguing.

Justin Gerard did some illustrations for the opening that are super and the guys from Edgeworx put some motion graphics sauce on them.

I had a small part in that I contributed some storyboards. I think this job was finished over a year or so ago, but I seem to remember my part was a little rushed. This made me especially grateful for the “on-top-of-it-ness” from all the guys at Edgeworx. The boards were okayed, I got some reference together and Justin worked a couple ridiculously long weeks and put together the illustrations you see in the game.

Below are the storyboard/final comparisons. I took screenshots from the first two minutes of a video that shows Justin’s work.

I hurt my back saturday and now I’m hobbling around. I’m about to go to the chiropractor, and it’s raining. All in all I feel pretty crummy so I decided to post this picture of Jimmy Carter. He began with an approval rating higher than Obama and he left office with an approval rating somewhere in the low thirties.

Jimmy Carter reminds me of a kid on my street who was always hurting himself. This kid’s name was also Jimmy. I remember he bought a bike at a garage sale and we made fun of it. He assured us that it was a little rusty on the outside, but at its core, it was a fine bike. To prove his point he set out to pop a wheelie in it. “Watch this!” he said. We all looked his way and he jerked back on the handle bars to lift the front tire. He jerked his handle bars right off the post and crashed spectacularly. We howled with laughter. Jimmy hurt himself so frequently and in such dramatic fashions that we all grew to like him. Sympathy can grow even in the rocky soil of a child’s heart. Still, we never would have trusted Jimmy to buy us a bike, or run a country for that matter.

FW inks and photoshop experiment. Also, I should mention, I’ve properly indexed my posts and the categories are listed on the right hand side at the bottom, as well as tagged at the bottom of the post for easy reference.

Update: Also, I added another gallery above if you want to see some older stuff but don’t want the trouble of sifting through the tabs.